On the litho floor, thermal error doesn’t give you much room to breathe. A FOUP that holds onto moisture or runs hot in one corner and cold in another pushes the photoresist past its thermal budget. You don’t see it at the coater—you see it later as line-width excursions and scumming. We built the FOUP dryer to strip that variability out, so the process window stays where it needs to be: on the wafer.
What matters under the hood The unit holds wafer-level thermal uniformity within ±0.1°C across the FOUP, using a cleanroom-compatible heat profile that dries without driving solvents into the resist or letting contaminants outgas. Particle generation is effectively zero—materials and airflow are laid out for Class 1–100 cleanrooms. Repeatability is baked into the control loop and the mechanical interface, so every bake cycle lands the same, batch after batch. Reliability? It comes down to running without unplanned downtime that throws off line balance. Why it plays in a 24/7 fab FOUP dryer performance hits cycle time, scrap, and energy spend directly. Tight temperature uniformity keeps soft bake and hard bake intact, which means fewer reworks and tighter critical dimension control. Cleanroom-compatible construction keeps particle counts down—exactly what advanced nodes demand. The payoff is fewer excursions, stable process capability, and a lower cost per wafer, without slowing throughput to chase thermal margin. Here are the practical details Installation hinges on matching the docking interface and exhaust routing to the specific track and FOUP carrier footprint, so loop in the tool integration team early. The dryer also needs stable utilities—clean dry air and a solid electrical supply—to hold the uniformity spec. Plan a short commissioning run to lock in the bake profile for your resist stack.